The Minnesota Orchestra posts a $1.19 million deficit. “In most respects, the report Friday was upbeat, even turning a bit zany at one point when music director Osmo Vänskä and orchestra president Tony Woodcock played “If I Were a Rich Man” on clarinet and piano. Expenses were cut by $2 million during 2004-05, which brought on a rare occurrence in the orchestra world: a budget actually being less than it was the year before, $27 million, down from $28.6 million. A key cost-cutting measure came when the musicians agreed to a one-year wage freeze.”
Blog
Davidson: American Tragedy Lives Up To Name
Justin Davidson writes that Metropolitan Opera’s “An American Tragedy” is a disappointment for all the effort spent on it. “Eight years after the Metropolitan Opera commissioned a new work from Tobias Picker – and five since the company’s last world premiere – comes an opera that should have been half as long and twice as taut.”
Battle For The Architectural Soul Of The South
America’s Gulf Coast is rebuilding. But a battle has broken out about what rebuilding will look like. “The idea that New Urbanists may be helping to write plans for the new Gulf Coast has horrified many architects and left-leaning cultural critics — revealing, in the process, quite a bit about the ambitions and anxieties that mark contemporary architectural practice in this country.”
Classical Ideals – Still Relevant?
“Epic tales, attributed to the Greek poet Homer, aren’t just adventure stories, although on that level alone they deserve to have endured for centuries. They’re also instructive moral and ethical allegories about virtues such as courage, fidelity and honor. European artists of the 17th through the 19th centuries were inspired by these sagas, which attests to their durable appeal. But now we’re in the 21st century. Do paintings and sculptures that propound classical ideals still have anything to say that today’s museumgoers would find meaningful?”
Deep Cover – The Singers Who Save
“Cover singers are opera’s equivalent of the Broadway understudy, and like replacement artists in most forms of live performance, they are an essential but unseen part of the process. Without them, an incapacitated star can send a production scrambling. Even worse, they can bring it to a grinding halt.”
Building Threatens Watts Towers?
A new municipal building is being erected in the parking lot next to LA’s Watts Towers. “Neighbors are concerned about congestion, and preservationists who cherish Simon Rodia’s fantasia of folk-art sculpture worry that the new building, which would augment the smaller, existing arts center nearby, will obstruct views of the towers. They question why officials decided to place a new, $4.7-million youth arts center near the towers, rather than on city-owned property around the corner that originally was designated for the project.”
A Month Of Novels
November was National Novel-Writing Month. “Nearly 60,000 people around the world set out Nov. 1 to reach the goal of writing 50,000 words in 30 days. About one in six made it. Students could enter under less-strict guidelines.”
Suzanne Farrell At 60
“At 60, after more than 2,000 performances with the New York City Ballet (and a few hundred with the Bejart Ballet), the dancer who now directs will receive the Kennedy Center Honors tonight, right across the street from the apartment she calls home.”
The End, Finished, Done
Everyone talks about the importance of first lines in novels. “But they aren’t really as important to a novel as the last lines. From a terrible first line, a novel may recover; the last line is what it leaves a reader with.”
Scottish Opera To Go Pop?
The embattled Scottish Opera will be branching out, becoming more adventurous, says its chairman. “I would like to see Scottish Opera doing West Side Story. It is a great piece, one of Bernstein’s best and a dead ringer for Glasgow. This is because the Puerto Ricans and New Yorkers in the 1950s mirror the razor gangs in Glasgow of the same period. I am very keen on playing in a stadium. I am very keen on that. I saw Teresa Berganza singing Carmen in the Stade Bercy in Paris in front of about 18,000 people and it was electrifying.”